Copy Data Management Optimizes the Hybrid Cloud

Catalogic Helps Deliver the Greatest Value of the Hybrid Cloud by Automating Creation and Use of Workloads

The cloud has revolutionized business IT by offering low-cost, on-demand access to infrastructure at near-limitless scale.

Hybrid cloud approaches are especially attractive as they allow for running some workloads on-premise and others in the cloud – for example, by keeping certain types of workloads on-site and designating others to the cloud; or by allowing for some on-site workloads to “burst” into the cloud in response to temporary spikes in demand. Yet despite the clear advantages, many organizations have yet to embrace the hybrid cloud, holding back because of concerns about how difficult or disruptive the transition may be, about whether the touted benefits will really materialize, and about whether sufficient visibility and control can be maintained in a hybrid cloud environment.

Catalogic ECX copy management software helps organizations adopt and fully leverage hybrid cloud by making it easy to create and use cloud-based workloads, by helping you maximize your return on cloud investment, and by ensuring that you maintain unified visibility and control across your on-premise and cloud environments.

Catalogic ECX: Fast Track to the Hybrid Cloud

Catalogic ECX is a software-only solution to the challenge of creating, distributing, and analyzing copies of production data across your entire environment whether on-premise or in the cloud. In contrast to other copy data management (CDM) solutions that require ripping and replacing storage infrastructure, Catalogic ECX is a lightweight, agentless automation and orchestration layer that leverages the snapshotting and replication APIs of your existing storage and virtualization systems such as NetApp, IBM, EMC and VMware.

With Catalogic ECX, after a fast and simple install and an initial registration of your on-premise and cloud storage and virtualization components, you can pivot quickly to building a service catalog through which authorized users can create, use, and remove cloud-based copies of all or portions of your production environment, on demand. Since many of the most beneficial cloud use cases – such as dev/test, business analytics, and disaster recovery – depend on copies of production data, Catalogic ECX’s ability to deliver automation, orchestration, and self-service across the entire copy data lifecycle, without requiring an overhaul of your existing infrastructure, makes it the killer app for hybrid cloud adoption.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits, Fully Realized

Catalogic ECX not only simplifies and accelerates your hybrid cloud adoption, it also helps you to more fully realize the two most-often touted benefits of the cloud:

Agility. If the IT help-desk queue is a roadblock that prevents key user groups from using the cloud as soon as they need it, then your organization is not truly capitalizing on the agility afforded by cloud services. By empowering authorized users with on-demand self-service (via GUI or REST API) for the creation and use of copy data in the cloud, you allow for true agility that translates into business benefits such as more timely analytics, dev and test beds that better reflect the current production environment, and more frequent verification of disaster recovery capabilities. At the same time, the IT team retains ultimate control by integrating best practices and corporate policies into the automation templates, and by determining who is allowed which self-service privileges.

Cost savings. Cloud services allow you to pay only for what you use, but that does you little good unless you use only what you need. Catalog ECX fosters efficient utilization of cloud resources by enabling storage admins to build copy data retention behaviors into the service automation templates, by making it easy to tear down instantiated virtual environments on schedule or on demand, and by supporting reporting and analytics that highlight data that’s not being used or that’s over-replicated. In addition, ECX can move selected data from physical storage assets to Amazon Web Services S3, for low-cost, long-term data retention, thereby removing pressure on storage growth.

Catalogic Software

How hard will it be to maintain visibility into all of your organization’s IT objects across on-premise and cloud environments?

With Catalogic ECX, the answer is “Not hard at all”. After initial install and configuration, Catalogic ECX quickly creates a comprehensive catalog of critical IT objects – including VMDKs, storage snapshots and replicas, datastores and applications -- enterprise-wide, across local and cloud environments. The catalog, which can be refreshed on schedule or on demand, is fronted by a powerful search engine and also forms the basis for dozens of reports that offer important insights into your storage, VM and application environments.

Learn More About How Catalogic ECX Can Help Your Organization Maximize Your Return On Hybrid Cloud

Using the Cloud for disaster recovery doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. This technical validation white paper shows how by combining IBM Spectrum Virtualize storage, IBM SoftLayer Cloud and Catalogic ECX, you can easily deploy a totally automated disaster recovery infrastructure that can be as much as three times less expensive than manual solutions. Full TCO details are included.

The limitless compute resources of the cloud are perfectly suited for disaster recovery. But many organizations have tried and failed to make it work. The reason is the lack of automation and orchestration, and an inability to easily connect corporate system-of-record data with cloud compute. This session will demonstrate how Catalogic, SoftLayer and NetApp join forces to deliver an elegant solution that allows clients to easily set up and run DR to the cloud, which includes the ability to run daily fully-automated DR testing.

Experience the Power of ECX in 15 minutes!

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In Their Words

"IT organizations are under tremendous pressure from the combination of growing data volumes and limited IT budgets. In order to tackle the problem of growing data, you have to first have insight into data in the enterprise. Catalogic’s new ECX Enterprise Catalog makes this possible.”

— Randy Kerns Senior Strategist, Evaluator Group

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